“Even with my hair being the wrong color, I still think we are perfect,” Hugh said conversationally, as if he were discussing breakfast. “Particularly you.”
I gulped. Everything I always believed about love—the burning meteors and raging eyes—reeled through my head, along with the conviction that I’d been wrong.
It might be that love was two people who went together like butter and marmalade. Like the end of a symphony, whenyou turn to your favorite person in the world, free to go home with him.
“You turned me down last time,” Hugh went on. “I don’t mind telling you that I was pretty shattered afterward.”
“You were?” I blurted out. “You put the ring back in your pocket, shrugged, and said, ‘Oh well.’?”
I realized that his large hand had wrapped around one of mine, because he brought it to his lips.
“I couldn’t make myself vulnerable,” he said.
“Vulnerable? Youwhistledas you walked out.”
“Did I ever tell you why I read classics at Oxford?”
I shook my head.
“Because I knew you’d want a man who knew literature,” he said, shocking me to the core. “If you had left me alone, if we had never met, I’d be like any other peer, Snaps. I’d be riding to the hounds every week, if not every day. I’d take up my seat in the House of Lords when I was forced and spend the rest of the time bothering about drains. Actually, I may still bother about drains, because sanitation is important. That’s probably the biggest lesson I brought back from the Tour.”
“I do realize that,” I said, not wanting to sound like a complete lout.
“I read literature in order to win your hand, which included a great many love poems, but I couldn’t share any of them with you because you were too young. Then when you debuted, I tried to give you freedom in case you found someone you liked better, but you didn’t seem to, so I showed up and tried my luck.”
“There’s no one I like better,” I said flatly.
I could hear the lark singing again. I suppose I really am a novelist, because I was in the midst of the most important conversation of my life, and I found myself cataloguing everything: notjust the lark (shades ofRomeo and Juliet!), but the way the rough stones felt underneath my rear and the warmth of his legs against mine. The clouds had blown away, and the sky was blue behind him, but I couldn’t stop looking at his face.
Hugh’s pupils are rimmed with a thin line of black, and his jaw is frightfully manly. His eyes didn’t precisely flash at me, but the expression in them made me feel hot all over. And happy. Happy deep inside my body.
“At the time, I thought,” I said rather shyly, “that you would ask me again. Or try to make me fall in love with you. After all, you had scarcely danced with me during the Season.”
“I couldn’t,” he said.
My smile was faltering, when he clarified, “I loved you too much, and it made me bad-tempered to see other fellows flirting with you. The night of your debut ball, I was tempted to knock one of my oldest friends down for daring to waltz with you.”
“Oh,” I breathed, seeing that evening in a whole new light. I had thought that Hugh was bored and showed up only out of friendliness. “I thought you asked me because your mother forced you to.”
He shook his head. “She knew, of course. I had to ask her for the ring that’s always given to the next countess, but she had nothing to do with it. I got on a boat for France the day after you turned me down, which is where I meant to take you if we married.”
My heart thumped. “Because I know French?”
“Because you long to travel, and I want to travel with you. We would have started there and gone wherever you wish. As it was, I walked around cataloguing things that you would love and waiting for you to write me. Then I would take off for a new place, leaving a groom behind me to make sure that I didn’t miss a single one of your letters.”
“I had no idea,” I croaked. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“You refused me so briskly, as if the idea of our marriage was inconceivable. The morning before, I told my sister that I meant to propose, and she said, ‘No woman could possibly fall in love with someone called Squibby. She’s not in love with you.’?”
“We bungled the whole thing,” I breathed.
“The only thing that gave me hope was that your letters were addressed to ‘Hugh.’?”
“Your sister is probably right,” I said, feeling as if I was overflowing with emotion. “Except it was too late for me. You don’t think that I’d eat a worm for just any old fellow, do you?”
Hugh breathed something that sounded like a grateful curse, and then he leaned even closer and kissed me.
Ihavebeen kissed, remember? Any number of times in the last year. I didn’t let anyone kiss me in my debut Season because… well, because. I was waiting. After Squibby left for France, I went through a phase of reckless kissing, trying to find out if love was a lightning bolt spurred by desire.
